Many people ask why it is that juries are so quick to convict tax patriots for crimes under the Internal Revenue Code.  There is a good scientific explanation for the phenomenon.  In the 1950s, Soloman Asch, a researcher, conducted a series of experience to determine the ability of individuals to make independent judgments in the face of group opposition.  Only 20 percent of the subjects were capable of independent judgment.  Asch concluded that:

‘…social life makes a double demand on us: to rely upon others with trust and to become individuals who can assert our own reality…We may suppose that this aim can be achieved under favorable circumstances, but even then not without struggle...But there are conditions less favorable for development which, while encouraging the individual to live in a wider and richer world than the individual can encompass alone, also injure and undermine him.  This happens when social circumstances stifle the individual’s impulses and deny them expression. (Quoted in David Burston, The Legacy of Erich From, Harvard University Press, 1991, p. 153.)

            In another famous experiment by Stanley Milgram, subjects were made to believe that they were shocking an actor hidden behind a screen.  When the actor, gave an incorrect response to a question, the subject was instructed to administer increasing shock.  Incredibly, most of the subjects would administer shock when ordered to do so, even though they believed the actor was suffering terribly.

            The moral of the story is that most individuals  cannot  take a position independent of the majority and most people are obedient to authority even if that authority goes against their reasoning and values.  Truth endorsed by authority is likely to be accepted as such by a majority of people. Is it any surprise that juries continue to convict patriots for “willfulness” in spite of substantial evidence of non “willfulness?”

            With these points in mind, it is necessary to be very careful when you stand up for your Constitutional rights. 

The Screwing of the

American Taxpayer

            Under our economic system, the ordinary guy pays twice for most things.  First of all, he pays as a taxpayer, he provides subsidies and then as a consumer, he buys high-priced commodities and services.  New technologies like nuclear energy, electronics, etc, are developed and paid for by taxes, but then the technology is given to private industry for private gain.  For example, AT & T has control of the entire satellite communications system, even though the taxpayers paid the original billions to develop it. 

            The U.S. government also spends billions to help U.S. companies move to overseas markets with cheaper labor and the government has poured more than $500 billion into the savings and loan associations. 

            The government uses taxation as a means of redistributing income to the rich.  The wealthiest 3 percent of the population earn 33 percent of income (as reported) but pay only 15 percent of taxes.  The rest of us together earn only 67 percent of the nation’s income but pay 85 percent of the taxes.   ( See Washington Post, February 1, 1990).

            Corporations are paying much less tax now than they did forty years ago.  Corporate revenues amounted to 50 percent in 1945.  Today, they are 8 percent.  The revenue loss has been made up by increase in taxes on the middle and lower classes.  In 1983, a working mother with three children making $10,000 per year paid more taxes than Boeing, General Electric, Du Pont, Texaco, Mobil and AT&T combined.  After the tax reform act of 1986, sixteen major corporations paid no taxes, including General Motors, IBM, Hewlett-Packard and Greyhound in spite of the fact that they made combined profits of ten billion dollars. (The Corporate Tax Comeback, study by Citizens for Tax Justice-Washington, D. C. ; September 1988.)

            The current federal tax system is a regressive tax because it allows many write-offs for business and big-earners that are not available to the rest of us.  In forty-five of the fifty states, the poorest 20 percent of the population pay higher state and local taxes than the richest 1 percent. In Washington State, the tax difference between poor and rich is 17.4 to 3.4 percent in Texas, 17.1 to 3.1 percent in South Dakota, 10.8 to 2.2 percent; in Connecticut, 11.9 to 4.2 percent: A Far Cry from Fair, report by Citizens for Tax Justice, Washington D. C., April 1991.

            Today the government is spending so much that it must borrow against the future earnings of the American people.  The national debt was $43 billion in 1940 because of the cost of the New Deal.  The cost of World War II brought the total debt to $259 billion.  By 1981, it was $908 billion.  Reagan tripled the debt and then Bush added to it so that by 1994, the debt was increasing at a rate of $1 billion every two days.  The accumulated budget outlays from 1982 to 1993 were $12,699 billions from Congress and $12,692 billions from the White House, not an appreciable difference:  Jerome Grossman, “Blame Game,” Nation, October 26, 1992 p. 457.

            The debt is growing at such an excessive rate because of the great tax cuts to the rich, the incredible spending on the military-industrial complex and the tremendous increase in interest payments.  Right now, over 80 percent of the money collected by the government goes to pay interest on money previously borrowed.

            So the government has been using social security to hide the deficit.  Almost half the taxpayers pay more in social security tax than they pay in income tax.  Americans don’t complain about social security tax very much because they think they will get something back from the government, but social security taxes are currently used to offset deficits in the budget.  The Clinton administration has ignored the methods that would help to solve the national debt problem.  If he would raise corporate taxes and take the burden off the middle class, reduce the incredible military budget and put the money into sectors of the economy that would create jobs and growth, he could make a dent in the current problems.  It doesn’t seem that our politicians really have any interest in seeing to it that the middle class survives. (This article was written thirteen years ago, things are now worse.)